


never meet your martyrs

by puckity



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy (?) Ending, Canonical Character (Non-)Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Mommy Issues, The Tragic Saga of the Winchesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-18 03:31:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13091520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puckity/pseuds/puckity
Summary: They needed to know Mary, but first Mary needed to know herself.





	never meet your martyrs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [winchesterchola](https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchesterchola/gifts).



> Written for the luminous [Pan](http://winchesterchola.tumblr.com) as a belated birthday offering! Thank you for being such a beacon of support and positivity, babe--I'm so blessed that these codependent fools brought us together! ❤❤❤❤❤
> 
> Beta'd by the long-suffering [Rachel](http://betterwithsparkles.tumblr.com/).
> 
> You can also follow me on [Tumblr](http://puckity.tumblr.com/), if you'd like!

The pages cracked like drought-dry bark, brittle and frayed and rubbed down from years of fingertips flipping through them. Fingertips that belonged to a husband who was made to live a second life without her, to sons who grew around and beyond the memory of her. Smudged and yellowed and full of jumbled scratchings and fine-lined, military-grade printing and page after page of the monsters that Mary thought she’d bartered herself away to protect them from. To protect her boys, her family.

But here it was—all her mistakes spelled out and spiral-bound for her. Offered with tea and a soft, tentative smile from a son she’d never had, a man who’d landed in her life fully-formed and she wondered if she’d ever be able to connect the dots between him and the quiet baby she’d stared down at from behind the flames.

\---

The man Mary knew—the man who picked her up in a second-hand car with a fresh coat of wax, the man who shook her father’s hands with sweaty palms and complimented her mother’s store-bought meatloaf and ran circles around their living room with little Dean shrieking and laughing in his arms—the _John_ Mary knew scribbled love notes and scattered them around the house for her to find. He made grocery lists with big, loopy scrawls and signed birthday cards with giddy, childish letters. He was full of warmth in messy bursts and Mary had to ask him every time to decode his excited little messages.

The John who kept this journal was precise, meticulous, unforgiving. It was an encyclopedia of horrors that Mary had known as bedtime stories—collected and detailed like enemies under constant surveillance—and she didn’t recognize the man behind the writing.

Each entry was exhaustive; he must have become a resource for other hunters, whether he wanted to be or not. The John she knew would have shared everything he had just for the decency of it but this one—she wasn’t so sure.

This was a book of monsters with mementos and memories folded in like bookmarks, like sparse afterthoughts. Like nothing in life mattered except for knowing all the ways the things that lurked in the dark could die. A photo like the last night before a suicide mission, a smudged column full of phone numbers with the words “Dean’s burners” circled at the top, crumbled receipts for motel rooms and gas stations and convenience stores. A few phrases in a looser hand in the back: “Sam’s graduation” and “ask Bobby about curse boxes” and “flowers for Mary”.

If it’d only been monsters, Mary would’ve wondered if John had kept a separate personal journal for everything else he didn’t want to forget. And maybe he had; maybe the tall, sad-eyed boys who said they were her sons would give it to her if she asked. Or maybe the John who kept this journal had decided there wasn’t anything else worth reminding himself of; maybe he’d convinced himself that the notes in the back with the small loops were all that he needed to remember.

Written in bold capital letters, black ink with red traced over until it had bled through to the pages behind it, was the biggest reminder John had left:

WATCH SAMMY

WATCH DEAN

WATCH THEM BOTH

\---

Mary needed space, needed time, needed to find a way to carve out a new person to be in a world where she was a mistake. She needed to come up with some answers for the questions she knew Sam and Dean were biting back every time they looked at her, every time they tried not to stare and failed anyway. She needed to learn how to be a mother in reverse, how to have missed all the big ticket items and still matter to her sons. She needed to understand that the memories—the heaven full of a perfect family—wasn’t real, had never been real.

She needed to teach herself that these two angry, haunted, sorrow-soaked men were her real boys—and they needed that too. Needed to learn that the mother who’d burned up in Lawrence was a myth, a lie, a fairy tale John had told them and they’d told themselves to keep going. They needed to know Mary, but first Mary needed to know herself.

But they needed something else too—something that Mary couldn’t quite catch in the conversations they shared between glances, couldn’t quite read in the lines their bodies drew towards each other, in the ways they always seemed to curve together rather than apart.

Maybe it was just that they needed to adjust too, needed to teach themselves how to have a permanent mom again. Things they hadn’t had before, things they must’ve had to try to give each other.

It couldn’t have been easy.

Mary remembered how Dean’s gaze had followed Sam like a ping pong ball after they’d gotten him away from that British letter woman’s torture farmhouse and back to the musty old bomb shelter they called The Bunker. How when Sam wandered off—to the bathroom or his bedroom or wherever; it was their house—Dean had gone stiff and still, like he didn’t trust Sam to make it on his own. Like he wanted to, needed to, be with him but then he’d snap back to Mary and swallow down the half-bottle of beer he had left instead. Forced awkward small talk and pulled a tight, stretched smile and Mary didn’t push it because this was too new for both of them, raw like ripping off a scab before the wound had fully healed. So she played along, hit the ball back and forth and it could’ve almost passed for a normal family dinner—or at least a normal hunter family dinner—except that every now and then Dean’s eyes darted to the empty doorway behind her like he just couldn’t help himself.

On the way back from Saint Paul they shared the front seat, shared a roadside burrito and garbage fries, played with the volume and passed napkins and answered questions before they were asked. Dean looked at Sam, Sam looked at Dean, they both looked away. And it reminded Mary of other drives this car had seen, with other people, in other situations.

Hands reached for the tape deck at the same time: fingers brushed, lingered, hesitated and pulled back like wheels spinning in mud. Mary knew that move, knew that spinning, knew it in that front seat.

But those were other situations.

 _Had to be_ other situations.

\---

“What about your friends?” Mary asked over a cowboy skillet that Dean had cooked up for breakfast.

He scooped green chilies over three plates and gave her a spoonful more than Sam. “What, you mean our hunter contacts?”

“No.” She handed a fork to her younger son. “I mean your friends.”

“Cas is our friend.” Sam cut a wedge out of the corner of his eggs, kept his mouth closed as he chewed.

Mary wondered who had taught him such good manners.

“He’s an angel.”

Dean arched an eyebrow, stabbed at a potato. “So?”

Mary hesitated, not sure what she might unravel if she pulled at that thread. “What about your other friends?”

Their eyes locked—Dean titled his head, Sam shrugged. They both swallowed.

“We got each other.” Dean kept his eyes on his food. “Who needs anyone else?”

\---

“Mom to mom, they’re good men. Best I’ve ever met.”

Mary had expected her boys to know people and for people to know them. She expected them to have people in their lives who cared about them, people they cared about. She wanted that for them.

She just hadn’t expected that they’d already have a mom.

Jody Mills was good people, decent people and Mary had only known her for a couple of hours (give or take a demonic possession) but she could tell in her gut that Jody was a good mother too. The way Dean stood up a little straighter when she put a hand on his arm. The soft, warm tone she took with Sam when he started tripping over something he wanted to say. The way they went smoother at their edges around her, looked to her for cues and reassurance and everything Mary knew they thought they couldn’t ask for since she left their home.

When Sam had shouted for her to stop, for her to drop the angel blade—that she couldn’t that this was different that this was _Jody_ —there had been half a second when Mary almost plunged the blade in just because she could. Because this was what they—hunters, _Winchesters_ —did. Because how dare this woman wind like a vine into her sons’ lives and fit herself into the mother-space that hung empty between them.

In another life, Jody could’ve been something else. A lover, a friend even. But in this life, her boys didn’t have friends—didn’t have anyone but John’s car and each other—and that was just one more way Mary had failed them.

“I know.” And—mom-to-mom—she did. “They’re not the problem.”

\---

Mick had her on a surveillance run for some cabin in the middle of nowhere, so by the time Mary got around the checking her voicemails Dean’s message was already three days old:

“Hey, mom—how’re you doing? You, um, don’t have to answer that just…you know, hope you’re doing good. Sam and I are out here in Arkansas on a witch job and something, um, something happened. I’m fine— _we’re_ fine—I just wanted to give you a heads-up in case you don’t hear from us for a few days. Just…didn’t want you to worry.”

She drove to Eureka Springs that night with nothing but a convenience store bag full of jerky and four cans of those espresso energy shots Sam had introduced her to when she told him she wasn’t much of a coffee drinker.

She shook down every seedy motel clerk in town—no time for playing the ditz, no patience for church-lady niceties—until she found one who remembered renting out a room to two guys: tall, good-looking, older but not _old_ old, in and out a lot, paid cash. He’d guessed they were a couple based off the bickering alone, said the bigger one had been fluttering around like a spooked horse when he saw them in the parking lot the next day. They’d asked for two queens but the clerk said he’d seen that before too—propriety in a small town or they hadn’t gone public yet or hell, maybe they just appreciated the space to stretch out when they slept. He said his girlfriend and him had separate beds too; it helped with her sleep apnea.

Mary nodded along—polite, patient—not dwelling on anything that wouldn’t be immediately helpful in finding her boys.

The clerk said they’d checked out that morning; she’d missed them by less than two hours. Mary flashed a badge—reassured him that the men weren’t in trouble, that she was just doing routine follow-up—and by some skeezy miracle the motel had security cameras that actually worked.

She hadn’t seen them since the black site, the bridge in Rocky Mountain National Park and the death of a reaper. A death that should have been one of them—should have been her.

The grainy miniatures on the screen were talking to a tiny whip of a woman; Sam walked her over to a taxi and then held out his hand for something. She passed back a book, thick and dark and (if they’d been dealing with witches) probably a grimoire, and Sam twisted a sour half-smile back at her. The taxi pulled out of the lot and Mary took down its license plate number on the back of the clerk’s business card.

She watched as Sam walked back, folded his arms over the roof of the Impala and smiled clear and wide at something Dean must’ve said. Then they drove off, out of frame, and were gone.

\---

It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Low-risk, standard operation—that’s what Mick had said, that’s why she’d brought Wally in on it. No one was supposed to—to—

Her fingers slipped and stuck against the pools of Castiel’s blood. For some reason, she’d never considered the fact that angels might bleed just like the rest of them.

“Relax, just—just focus on breathing.” She folded the soaked-through fabric, tried to find a section that wasn’t drenched already. “We’re gonna get you out of here, gonna get you fixed up. Just breathe, Cas.”

The angel sputtered like the lance had punctured his lungs, like he had lungs to puncture.

“I don’t…” He slid further down against the bench. “I don’t know what happens when angels die. I don’t know where we go. I—I haven’t even thought about it, which is foolish since I’ve died before.”

Mary quirked her head; that was a story for another, less horrifying day.

Castiel nodded like a promise to tell her later. “I came back, and I never truly felt like I was gone. So this will be a new experience for me.”

“No, no. Look at me.” Mary grabbed his shoulder, left a bloody hand print on the khaki of his jacket. “You’re not gonna die today, not here. We won’t— _I won’t_ —let that happen.”

His gaze clouded, flickered like a wick at the bottom of a candle. “We don’t get heavens—why would we? Heavens are for souls. Angels are just administrators.”

Mary tore a strip off the bottom of her flannel, changed out the compress and brushed strands of sweaty hair off his forehead.

Another one of her boys hurt because of her.

“Did you like your heaven, Mary?” Cas’ hand dropped heavy over hers. “Were you happy there?”

“Yes.” She squeezed his fingers. “I was.”

“I’m glad.” He closed his eyes, exhaled through his nose. “Sam and Dean would have been happy too. That’s part of why I had to do it—why I had to kill Billie. She was going to throw them into the Empty. Whatever they’ve done…I couldn’t let her take their heaven from them.”

“Their heaven?” Mary remembered blinking against fire and opening her eyes to a breezy spring day and an inherent understanding of the rules. “I thought that heavens were individual.”

“They are.” Cas clenched, grit his teeth and she tried to ease up on the pressure. “Unless two people are fundamentally, cosmically bound. If you share souls, you share a heaven.”

Something was ringing in Mary’s ears. “Are you saying that my sons share a soul?”

“No, that would be impossible.” Cas coughed; a few flecks of red stained his lips. “I’m saying that their souls are paired. The concept has been widely misinterpreted on Earth, but because Sam and Dean are soulmates their heavens are merged. So Billie wouldn’t have just taken their heaven—she would have split their souls.”

“Soulmates.” Mary whispered and it echoed between them.

“Yes.” Cas dug his elbows into the seat and pushed himself back up, held himself firm. “They’re— _you all are_ —everything, all that I have, and I won’t let anything hurt you like that. I won’t let anything take you from me and throw you somewhere I can’t follow.” He—the strange, weak skin holding the fierce swell of an angel together—shuddered. “Not if I can stop it.”

\---

They ran into each other, out of every possible dot on the map, at a tea shop in Salem.

Mary was doing a little freelancing, needed a couple hours to herself without Ketch clinging to her ankles. So when they’d finished putting silver bullets into the last few frat boy werewolves in a Boston pack, she’d asked Mick if she could take a personal day or two. Ketch pouted—as much as a petulant psychopath could—but headed back to the compound and left a rental car for her.

She’d planned on making the drive down to Fall River the next day to see if she could pry anything out of the King of Hell; Salem was, since she was in the neighborhood anyway, just for fun.

“I know you.” Mary sat down uninvited, let the handle of her gun peek out from under her fleece vest.

“It’s possible.” The woman held her cup—stirred the tea and scraped along the porcelain. Her accent was thick like taffy. “I have known plenty of people in my life.”

“You know my sons.” Mary corrected. “Sam and Dean Winchester.”

She looked up at that. Her hair was a shock of red that hadn’t shown up on the black and white security footage.

“Oh aye, the Winchesters. Those muddling bampots.” She unlaced a smile; Mary’s trigger finger itched. “They’re your sons, then? You must be the Mother Winchester that Fergus mentioned—the one who stomped all over a Prince of Hell’s garden or some such. I can see the family resemblance there.”

Mary counted the civilians, estimated the collateral damage. “Fergus?”

“You probably know him by his ridiculous stage name: Crowley.” She rolled her carefully made-up eyes, perfect eyeliner in place of the wrinkles that should have been there. “Those flannel-coated lumberjacks aren’t the only ones with Oedipal issues. I swear, anything goes wrong—mild taunting, multi-century abandonment, a few failed assassination attempts—and everyone’s all, ‘Blame the mother’. It’s exhausting.”

She took a delicate sip.

“But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.”

And she didn’t, Mary already knew, but that wasn’t the point.

“Wait, _Crowley_ is your son? You’re a demon?” Mary wished she’d grabbed her flask of holy water out of the duffel.

“One of those spineless little smoky weasels? Heavens no.” She tapped her nails against the lace tablecloth. “I’m a witch. _The_ witch, some might say, but I don’t demand that.”

She leaned forward like this was all a particularly juicy piece of gossip.

“But you can call me Rowena, and I’ll call you Mary. It’s just simpler that way, don’t you think?”

Mary ground her boot heels into the tile. “I think that it doesn’t matter what you call me because as soon as this shop clears out I’m gonna drop you.”

Rowena hummed. “Assuming you could even do that, what have I done to you to warrant such a threat? I’ve been underground for months, and I’m pretty sure you were still dead before that.”

“What did you do to my boys in Arkansas, when they were hunting witches?”

“Arkansas? I don’t even remember being there—I try to avoid the mid-south as much as possible.” A beat, and then she snapped her fingers. “Oh, you mean with the Loughlins! Well, I just saved Dean’s life, that’s all. Sam’s too, probably, although I won’t fight for credit on that one.”

“Saved their lives?” Mary flexed her fingers, cracked her knuckles out. “You were working with them?”

“As a consultant, more or less.” Rowena dipped a biscuit into her tea. “I mean, yes I have tried to brutally kill them—or have them brutally killed—in the past, but that’s all water under the relatively-stable bridge now. Bygones, and all that. We’re practically cautious allies now.”

Mary leaned back, crossed her arms across her chest. “Right, just like your son is pulling favors for them out of the goodness of his demonic heart.”

“Ack, Fergus.” Rowena scoffed, shook her head and her curls bounced with it. “The King of Hell absolutely _smitten_ with two jumbo-sized hunters—it’s outrageous, really. And I’ve tried to warn him, I’ve told him: ‘Fergus, those two will never choose you over anything.’ Besides, they only really have eyes for each other, don’t they?”

Mary stumbled, choked on everything she hadn’t been asking. Hadn’t been saying.

“Now, I’m not judging—my son sold his soul for a bigger tadger, so I don’t exactly have a high horse to ride on either. And I don’t think they’ve picked all the flowers in their attic, if you catch my meaning.” Rowena pursed her lips, hell-red and tight. “You were alive for that reference, weren’t you?”

Mary nodded once, swallowed down what was trying to scream up her throat.

“All I’m saying is that, they’re not like other brothers and everyone knows it.”

“I—” Mary sputtered. “I don’t know—”

“Yes, you do.” Rowena’s gaze cut sharp like a fistful of razors. “Mothers always know.”

\---

_It wasn’t her._

Rick turned his back, let his guard down. Sloppy like the gush of blood draining down his neck.

_This wasn’t her._

Lester knew something was off, threw the first punch. Mary bashed through his cheek until the brass knuckles hit cement.

 _She wasn’t_ — _she wasn’t there. She’d gone somewhere else, gone back to where she belonged._

Sun streamed through the kitchen windows; it was a breezy spring morning and everything smelled like the lilac bushes that John kept saying he was going to trim. But he hadn’t and they’d grown up along the back of the house, were starting to poke at the bottom of the windowsills. Mary reached for a bloom, could almost touch it, but then—

Crying, soft and hiccupy. She turned away from the sink and headed towards the stairs, but swayed back. The crib was in the living room, blanketed in warm wide light. She didn’t remember moving it—why would they have moved it? Maybe to be closer, safer?

“Mom.” A double tone, an echo.

Dean was sitting at the table, crossing his ankles. Waiting. Her sweet little patient boy, always right there whenever she turned around and needed to see him.

“I was thinking maybe we should take Sammy to the park later, before Daddy gets home.”

“Mom.” Dean didn’t look up. “Look at me.”

She brushed the cut crusts off to the side of the counter. A sudden tug, like a distress signal, but there was nothing there.

Nothing there.

She pulled away, kneeled down but Dean still didn’t look at her.

“I only want good things for you, Dean. I’ll never let anything bad happen to you.”

The room went suddenly, irrevocably cold.

_I hate you._

The crying melted into coos and Mary drifted towards it.

_You left us. Alone._

The light began to wane dull through the curtains.

_Dad was just a shell._

The air went sour, stank rotten like sulfur.

_I couldn’t do it._

She held onto the railing, leaned over to see her precious, perfect—

_Possessed by Lucifer. Tortured in Hell. Lost his soul._

_All because of you._

Sammy.

“I hate you.”

And it was wrong, she wasn’t there. It wasn’t her, she shouldn’t be—this was her—

“I hate you.” Dean was four, eating his sandwich and licking jelly off his fingers. But Dean was thirty-eight, almost a decade older than she was when she died, and he was beautiful and brave and patient—always waiting for her, even when she didn’t deserve the leeway.

“I hate you.” And he did, how could he not?

She hated herself too.

“But I forgive you, for all of it. For everything.”

He shouldn’t, neither of them should; not her brave little guardian and not the child she’d cursed, who’d had to pay for all of her sins for her. She’d broken her boys, cracked their lives into a million irreparable pieces and then vanished and they’d done what they could. What they had to.

Become who they had to, for everyone else and for each other, and Mary wasn’t ashamed. Whatever they were, they’d survived and the world survived with them.

“Mom.” Dean was standing at the end of Sammy’s crib, never out of reach. “I need you to see me.”

And finally, Mary did.

\---

Mary had been packing the Impala—overpacking, probably, but this was her first apocalypse and she wanted to be prepared. She checked the first-aid kit and rolled her eyes; there was a half-empty bottle of rye whiskey in place of antiseptic.

She rounded the corner out of the garage then stopped short at a muffle of voices.

“Dean, are you sure?” Sam sounded skeptical, with just a tinge of whine. “I know that Cas healed you but you were busted up pretty bad.”

Dean scoffed, but it didn’t have the edge that Mary usually heard in it. “You and I both know that I’ve had a hell of a lot worse.”

“Yeah, but…” Sam stretched out a pause. “You’re not as young as you used to be.”

“Oh, gee.” Mary bit back a chuckle at how pouty Dean could go. “Thanks, Sam.”

“I mean, me too! We’re both getting older, man. That’s just facts.” Mary could imagine the slightly-panicked pull of Sam’s face, eyes wide and blinking fast, ready to apologize even when he shouldn’t. “I just want you to be safe.”

Everything went quiet for a second and Mary felt like the whole bunker was holding its breath. There were a few shuffles and when Dean spoke again it came out in a low whisper.

“I’ll be safe.”

And Mary felt like she was witnessing something beyond the veil, something she should turn away from before it burned her eyes out.

“Whatever’s out there, baby boy, I got you for it.”

“Promise?” Sam sounded breathy like he wasn’t getting quite enough air.

Another shuffle and Mary almost missed it.

“Promise.”

\---

So this was it: face-to-face with the Devil in a douche leather jacket and if Mary was being honest about it she hadn’t thought that this would be where it would all end.

Where it began, where it started bleeding her family dry all those years ago. Where it stole her husband and her sons and hollowed them out, where it built up false idols along the way to remind them of everything they could never be. They’d all fought this battle before, and now it was her turn.

The blade ripped through Castiel’s chest, sliced open his grace, and that was it. Her boys had had enough taken from them—it was time for Mary to end this for them all.

“Get away from them.”

The Devil sneered, preened, and Mary knocked the brass together until it started to vibrate.

“Mom, Mom, Mom.” Her precious, perfect Sam—the boy who beat the Devil.

Lucifer’s jaw cracked under her fists.

“Mom!” Her beautiful, brave Dean—the boy who carried the world.

She hit each blow precisely, pummeled him back towards the rip in the universe.

And Mary hoped that they would understand, one day. That they would be able to remember her as she was, no more and no less.

“I love you.”

She did—just as they were—and she was proud of them, of who they made themselves to be. She wasn’t worried, not anymore, not even as a hand closed around her elbow and she and the Devil fell together.

They had each other; they would be okay.


End file.
